Entertainment

7 questions with the creator of 'Super Smash Bros.'

Nintendo's signature fighting game Super Smash Bros. has gone through many tweaks and upgrades for the most recent release.

From new games modes to the biggest roster of characters ever, the Wii U and 3DS versions have the most options the franchise has ever seen. Throughout its history, the franchise has been guided by its creator, Masahiro Sakurai, to merge both beginner-friendly and competitive play into one game.

Mashable had the chance to talk with Sakurai, who has become somewhat of an icon to fans of the game, about how this most recent iteration took shape. We discussed how he fills out the game's oft-debated lineup, his thoughts on high-level play and if downloadable content has a future in the franchise.

Mashable: The lineup of the game is something fans talk about endlessly. Has a vocal reaction ever made you consider adding a character you might have never thought of, or reconsider cutting a character that was eliminated?

Sakurai: Of course, I think about characters from a wide variety of perspectives as I make my decisions. However, I haven’t chosen any based strictly on popularity.

We do various kinds of research during the planning stage. We consider the inclusion of characters that feature in games being developed at the same time, are highly requested by users and are popular within their series. We then think about how they could be unique if they were to appear in Super Smash Bros.

After that, I consider what sort of personality and world setting we can implement with these characters. There wouldn’t be any value to a game where all the characters were the same, after all.

After a fair amount of research, we go on to make a decision on the characters while placing an emphasis on their uniqueness. Even if a character is highly popular and famous, they might not be chosen to appear as a fighter in Smash Bros. because they lack uniqueness. On the other hand, if a character seems to have the potential to exhibit an interesting characteristic, they might be selected regardless of their popularity. Also, the data files for a lot of characters that appeared in Super Smash Bros. Melee, such as Mewtwo, are now so old and outdated that it’s difficult to recreate them as-is in newer games.

This is the most robust lineup in the series history — can a fighting game ever have too many options for players? From your testing, are new players excited or intimidated by all the choices?

In the end, no matter how many characters there are, it’s not a big problem because (a) some people use nothing but their own particular favorites (b) all of them work under a unified control scheme. Smash Bros. features a slew of modes as well, but we didn’t create them all under the idea that we want gamers to try every single one of them. I think it’s just fine if gamers enjoy the aspects of the game they like. It’s kind of a buffet-style approach.

I understand from your E3 comments that you could only work on one version at a time, which makes sense. Why was the 3DS version of Super Smash Bros. prioritized over the Wii U version?

I think there was probably some misunderstanding behind the phrase “only work on one version at a time." My statements are constantly getting translated, so I often run into cases where the output is completely the opposite of what I meant, which can be a bit of a pain at times.

For this project, the Wii U version was developed as the standard base for character motions, game balance, and so forth. This was then dropped into the 3DS version. Thus, it’s not “one version at a time” but rather a parallel development process.

The 3DS version was released before the Wii U Smash Bros. because in the end, the Wii U version is a lot fancier and more complex, thus requiring that much more time for production and debugging. There were two reasons for the non-simultaneous release: to stagger the dev team’s time schedules (we’re talking hundreds of people for the 3DS alone), and due to issues related to our release-date strategy. Within Japan, four games have recently launched on Nintendo 3DS that have achieved sales of two million copies, which is almost unheard of. Our thought was that if we launched the 3DS version alongside the Wii U one in December, they would cannibalize each other’s sales to the point where it’d be a very bad situation.

How has the addition of downloadable content changed your thinking on the game's development?

I understand that DLC could add a lot to the appeal of Smash Bros., and I appreciate that a major part of the excitement for these games come from which characters will appear in the roster, so I think fans could really enjoy DLC that could keep this excitement going. However, I think there might be criticism that we are cutting up content to sell characters one by one, or that we are adding things later that should have been there from the start.

Creating a single fighter involves a huge investment, and we’ve already been giving it our all and investing a lot of work in the characters currently available in the game and, I think it’s an incredible package in terms of the sheer amount of content in the game. But it might be that people may not understand and may think that I am not offering enough by just looking at DLC itself.

Pokemon Greninja performs an attack in 'Super Smash Bros.' for Wii U.

Image: Nintendo

In light of this, we always need to weigh up both sides of this topic and carefully consider whether it really is best to have DLC or not.

However, what I can say now about paid DLC is that we aren’t working on anything at the moment. We’ve put all our efforts into making the actual game. Creating DLC would involve large additional costs and require the involvement of a lot of people. I can’t yet give you an answer about whether the price would justify the costs and criticisms mentioned above.

Can you give me some background on the elaborate testing process to make each character balanced with another?

First, we put together a monitor-testing team. These people are plainly experts; they rip me apart when I play them, but I use their battle stats to adjust the game’s balance.

However, I do not place that much emphasis on gameplay between groups of advanced players. If expert gamers were all I considered, I couldn’t have put in items or Final Smashes, the fighters’ abilities would be a lot closer to each other, and the balancing process would have been akin to pulling weeds from a garden. But that would kill the game. There’d be no care paid at all to beginners. What I’m more going for is something like a party game, something you can play on a whim and have fun as all sorts of things take place onscreen.

Also, during balancing, we tabulate results from 1-on-1 and 4-player fights on a flat field with no items. Even these two situations provide an advantage/disadvantage to certain fighters, which can change the results a decent amount. However, it’s not like we can change character abilities based on each battle situation, so that can’t be helped to some extent.

With Super Smash Bros. cult status, how do you balance bringing in new ideas with still bringing fans what they expect, and how important are fan expectations to you?

I do understand where players come from when they play in tournaments, remove items and other game elements, and try to hone their skills further and further. But if I went all-in with that and produced the whole game for hardcore fans, it’d start to tilt toward current titles in the fighter genre. It’d tend to be an exciting experience for expert gamers, but too forbidding for new players trying to get in. I always think from the perspective of the beginner and try to balance the game in between the two camps, and the result is Smash Bros. as you see it today.

If Smash Bros. were set up to appeal to experts too much and became something like a modern fighter, I think that would raise serious questions about the game’s future.

A game’s concept is one of its most important assets. I feel that we must aim to satisfy both beginners and experts, and that hasn’t changed since I was making Kirby games.

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